


Profile Picture

by Chameleon (ponchard)



Series: Good Old-Fashioned Passive Aggressive Discussion [6]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: (I mean yes also that one), (but the other binaries suck too), (the blog it started from - AI Weirdness - is also very good), ...not THAT binary, Arms Dealing, As A Software Engineer(tm), Birthday, Cobra Effect, Disguise, Entropy, Episode: s08e11 Dark Water, Episode: s08e12 Death in Heaven, Episode: s12e03 Orphan 55, Episode: s12e04 Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror, Episode: s12e05 Fugitive of the Judoon, Episode: s12e06 Praxeus, Episode: s12e07 Can You Hear Me?, Evolution, Flirting, Fluff, Gallifrey, I find Black Mirror incredibly frustrating, Information Theory - Freeform, Memetics, One Shot, Other, Pacifism, Perverse Incentives, Post-Episode: s12e01-02 Spyfall, Probability Clouds, Quantum Werewolf, Shitty Disguise, Short One Shot, Texting, Twelve couldn’t tell a human from a koala, What If Digital Immortality But Too Much???, also just realized “Dark Water” is basically a synonym for “Black Mirror”, and the Doctor would think, as different from something like a flower, as if humans reproduce in the vacuum of space, because of course it is, because tech DOES have issues, but Black Mirror is so consistently off the mark about WHAT the issues are, by Janelle Shane, conveniently for the Master, hm yes this tracks, if you’re looking for something more accurate, in full Evil Villain getup, is there anything more on-brand for a Dark Water fic, never mind a timelord, read You Look Like A Thing And I Love You, so much mask slippage lol, so why should we treat say a briefcase, than roasting Black Mirror, the Doctor says Fuck Binaries, the Master could rollerblade around, the barely tolerable human is at it once again, waving the TCE around, we can’t even digest food without help, which also needs help from other organisms to multiply, which needs human help to get copied, why do we care so much about the living/nonliving boundary, “viruses need host cells to reproduce - nonliving”
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-11
Updated: 2020-02-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:15:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22665379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ponchard/pseuds/Chameleon
Summary: The Master gives the Doctor a birthday present: a curious “human” to talk at.Which is kind of sweet but also kind of manipulative.Doctor/Master texting one-shot. Set immediately after Death In Heaven. Possible spoilers up through Can You Hear Me.
Relationships: The Doctor/O (Doctor Who), The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), Twelfth Doctor/O (Doctor Who), Twelfth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan)
Series: Good Old-Fashioned Passive Aggressive Discussion [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1603681
Comments: 14
Kudos: 49





	Profile Picture

**Author's Note:**

> toroidal = donut shaped

what a mess

**you don’t know the half of it**

know more than you think  
who do you think handles the coverup

**always wondered how you lot managed that**

well *I* don’t, but there’s enough chatter  
cybermen again, then

**the very same**

never quite the same, though. is it bad that I’ve been collecting them  
  
photos, I mean  
of the different models

**for your sake, let us hope that collection remains small**

hey knowledge is power

**how do you think they reproduce?**

they’ve got that What If Technology, But Too Much thing going on, haven’t they  
“cyber-conversion” or something like that

**ah right. early 21st**

?

**wrong side of the dichotomy  
one of the wrong sides anyway  
easier question: how do mosquitoes reproduce? **

evolution took a very different path on gallifrey, I take it

**same path  
always the same  
in your time, you understand only one cross-section of it  
like slices off a carrot  
your carrots aren’t toroidal, yes? **

not on this planet

**pity, toroidal carrots are quite good  
now focus  
how does a shirt reproduce? **

people buy it, and the factory makes more

**now we’re getting somewhere!**

what is cyber-conversion in these analogies

**irrelevant.**

yet you keep trying to stop it

**if you ever catch me doing something relevant, kindly talk me out of it  
now, entropy. the cybermen are one manifestation of it **

are you mistranslating that word? pretty much the opposite of what it means here on earth

**your time is obsessed with opposites**

please tell me you’re not agreeing with the horseshoe nutters

**agriculture was when it really started  
everyone clustered together around irrigation ditches **

back on mosquitoes

**never left  
and no, they’ve got their horseshoe sideways, across space  
everything that exists in the same TIME is on the same bit of the horseshoe  
not just the “extremes”, everything **

you saying we can’t eradicate mosquitoes without eliminating civilization?

**congratulations, you’ve created a toroidal carrot  
one version of civilization is not “civilization”  
entropy is statistical **

analyst for mi6 here, information theory is kind of my thing

**then maybe try not being such a pudding brain  
by human reckoning, the number of significant states is small, so noise appears more likely than not  
but that’s an artifact of naming  
as soon as a state is named, it appears ordered **

sort of like “decrypting” random noise

**your languages only allow for countably many names, making unordered states look vastly more likely  
-> entropy **

still think you’re translating that wrong

**fine, call it an “end state” then**

cybermen are an end state?

**nothing is a true end state  
but someone in the future will be wearing the exact same shirt as you **

like it that much

**I do. purple suits you**

**Author's Note:**

> The Doctor’s aversion to weapons makes way more sense if you ignore the human idea of pacifism and read it as a hygiene thing. 
> 
> Tools, like other viral ideas, “breed” by spreading through people’s minds. Using a weapon is sneezing **the idea of that weapon** onto nearby people. 
> 
> By using a mass-produced weapon, the Doctor would be helping it reproduce. They prefer improvised/one-off weapons because they’re much harder to duplicate and therefore less contagious.
> 
> Similarly, cybermen are both the physical cybermen + _the idea_ of cybermen, which is why they keep popping up independently in different parts of the universe.
> 
>  **Related Reading** (that’s right fellas, this slash has a bibliography)
> 
>   * _Internet of Garbage_ by Sarah Jeong 
>   * _Intuition Pumps and Other Tools For Thinking_ by Daniel Dennett 
>   * _This Video Will Make You Angry_ by CGPGrey 
> 

> 
> We don’t have the Doctor’s level of “information hygiene” yet, but the internet is forcing us to learn it. At this point about the best we can do is trick kids about Santa Claus and hope that immunizes them against more dangerous lies. We’re at the “get cowpox to avoid smallpox” stage.
> 
> -
> 
> Always appreciate your comments and kudos, even if you’re just saying hi! <3


End file.
